UTF-8 to ASCII conversion

Hi,

Is there an easy way in Oracle to convert a varchar2 string
containing non-English UTF-8 characters to a string with the closest ASCII approximations thereof.
E.g. a', a:, a^ (a with the accent, umlaut, circumflex, respectively), would be converted to the plain a.
I know I can do it by first converting the characters to raw bytes with utl_raw and then processing them byte by byte. I am just wondering if there is already a utility somewhere that does it.
Thanks.

You might want to set up a login.sql file for each user that declares

ALTER SESSION SET NLS_LANG=whatever

for each language that needs to display. You do this on a per user basis.

Oracle will translate UTF8 to the correct charset.

I don't know about utilites. The database won't do it for you ... unless you want to create your own custom database using "Oracle Locale Builder", (it comes with Oracle 9i). Then spend the next few hours, days, etc ... converting every Unicode character to an ASCII equivalent. It might get more complicated with the fact that many languages do funny things during translation. Mu:ller, in German, for example, is usually spelled "Mueller" in ASCII.